The Aerospace Corporation

The Aerospace Corporation has sponsored a series of projects focusing on issues in intrusion detection. The Intrusion Detection Working Group (IDWG) of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, a standards body) has been developing a common method of communicating intrusion detection events. This consists of two parts, a transport protocol and a message format. In this project, the Clinic team has been assisting in the development, implementation, and evaluation of two proposed transport protocols.

DIRECTV has asked the CS Clinic team to upgrade the current implementation of their web-based TV guide system. The system should allow extensive customization based on user preferences, and be accessible both at a computer and via wireless hand-held devices. In addition, the system should include the functionality of the newest generation of DIRECTV’s program guide, which is included with the most recent line of set-top units.

JPL would like to move away from the traditional practice of designing custom communications protocols for each device and mission, and towards using a layered approach called the Spacecraft Onboard InterFace (SOIF). To that end, the team was to implement TCP/IP on SpaceWire, a wiring bus being designed for spacecraft. Due to difficulties procuring the necessary hardware, however, the team has instead focused on tools to test Firewire, another bus being considered for space use. These tools should be easily extensible for use with SpaceWire.

Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole

Michael Cummings is a biologist at MBL working on the analysis of antibiotic resistance in tuberculosis bacteria. By building on the work of one of last year’s Clinic teams, the team has developed tools to predict the level of antibiotic resistance in a bacterium given its genome. These tools are flexible enough to be of use in a multitude of other classification problems.

Microsoft has recently introduced its “.NET” proposal for new web-browser technologies. The team was asked to produce prototype applications of the technologies to act as motivating examples to developers to get them interested in the system and act as design examples for how to use it.

N2H2, Inc.

N2H2 provides web-content filtering services to schools and companies around the world. Their current tools rely on a static list of web-sites identified by category, which must be updated frequently. The Clinic team has researched, designed, and prototyped a system for determining on-the-fly whether a page is of a specified category or not.

Nuera Communications, Inc.

Nuera provides high-end communications switches that carry voice telephone traffic over Internet connections. These are increasingly being used by mid-level phone service providers to bypass traditional communication paths. Testing these systems has previously required custom testing hardware costing millions of dollars. The Clinic team has developed software that instead allows Nuera to use one of its own switches as a hardware test suite, eliminating this cost.

Pomona Valley Center for Community Development

The Clinic team has developed a prototype of information kiosks to be placed in local public access points (e.g., supermarkets) to provide information about services provided by the PVCCD. Communications will be two-way, allowing, for example, users to file applications for services from these kiosks. The goal has been to design a web-based system with a rugged yet easy to use interface.

QB, Inc.

QB, Inc. provides software to corporations, such as movie studios, which need to manage large databases of media content, including photographs, audio, and video clips. The goal of this project was to produce software for a hand-held device to serve as a remote client for the QB MediaStar(TM) system. This required addressing the extreme limitations of hand-held devices, such as screen size, processor speed, storage, and communications bandwidth. The system is designed to accommodate forthcoming wireless technology as well.

Teradyne, Inc.

Teradyne is a leading producer of large-scale testing systems (ATEs) for semiconductor chip manufacturers. This project sought to develop a distributed, web-based interface to information about Teradyne equipment worldwide. The system will allow Teradyne to monitor the performance of all of their customers’ ATEs. It will promote closer collaboration between Teradyne and its clients through automatic licensing upgrades, bug tracking, and software update downloading, as well as support for real-time diagnosis and resolution of ATE problems.

Yahoo!, Inc.

Yahoo! Calendar has over two million active users. In systems of this scale, very small design decisions can have enormous practical impact on the performance of the system. In this project the students have undertaken a ground-up evaluation and redesign of the file and computational structures used in Yahoo! Calendar, in hopes of improving performance, usability, flexibility, and interaction with other Yahoo! services.

The Clinic team is designing a new initation system for the SADARM Smart Munitions that will work in both spinning and non-spinning carrier shells. The current system uses centripetal force from the spin to ignite an impact-based pyrotechnical primer. The initiator must actuate two timing delay fuses upon ejection of the submunitions stacks from the carrier shell after launch. The system must also contain a safety mechanism to allow for safe download.

Current equivalent-time sampling oscilloscopes require a user supplied data synchronized trigger to reconstruct a sampled waveform. Agilent has envisioned the possibility of their equivalent-time sampling ocilloscope being asynchronously triggered. The Agilent team has developed techniques for reassembling sample points taken on an equivalent time sampling system using an asynchronous trigger.

The TestJet System detects solder faults in circuit boards at the manufacturing stage by measuring the capacitance between a probe plate and the IC lead frame of the device under test. An amplifier on the probe plate amplifies the signal measured by the probe so that it can be sent over wires to the rest of the system. The Clinic team has investigated new circuit topologies for an amplifier that would increase the gain of the system while lowering the noise, thus improving the performance of the TestJet System.

The Capital Group Companies, Inc.

Urban Computer Lab Service Clinic for the Adventures Ahead After School Program (Bridging the Digital Divide)

The team designed and implemented an educational computer lab for the Adventures Ahead After School Program in South Central Los Angeles. This unique project was proposed by students and made possible by The Capital Group Foundation. The lab will help K-6 children improve their academic skills in reading, math, and computer usage to prepare them for junior high, high school, college or the work place. The research done and resources developed for this prototype will be made available through the web to other organizations desiring to establish computer labs in their communities.

Center for Innovative Minimally Invasive Therapy

A Pre-Hospital Diagnostic System for Trauma Victims in a Battlefield Environment

The goal of the CIMIT Clinic project is to develop a wearable diagnostic ensemble for use by battlefield medics. The diagnostic ensemble will take physiological measurements from a patient and present gathered data to the medic. This data along with a preliminary analysis of the soldier’s condition will aid the medic in diagnosing common combat-related trauma. Ultimately, the system will allow the medic to perform triage more quickly.

Danbury Elementary School

The Danbury Clinic team is designing a device that will function as a traditional cast used for bone fractures and allow Danbury Elementary School students with the rare bone disease Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI) to bathe, shower and swim. Danbury Elementary school serves students with physical disabilities and health impairments in the East San Gabriel Valley. There are seven students that attend Danbury that possess OI, which can easily be characterized as “brittle bones” disease.

DIRECTV Inc.

To conserve frequency bandwidth when offering local broadcasting, DIRECTV will implement a system of 40 individual satellite spot beams. Each spot beam will transmit local channels to a specific geographic area. The team’s assignment is to design and build a prototype system to measure the relative signal strength of satellite spot beams and to transfer this information to DIRECTV headquarters for analysis. DIRECTV will use this data to adjust the power levels of individual spot beams and decrease interference of co-frequency spot beams.

Federal Aviation Administration

Global Positioning System (GPS) Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) Category I to Category III Architecture Transition Options

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has hired the Clinic team to analyze possible improvements to the Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) Ground Station architecture. The current LAAS system does not take advantage of several advances that are available in the areas of multipath-reducing antennas, antenna voting schemes, and multi-sensor airborne continuity augmentation. The Clinic team will investigate the improvements, quantify the potential system performance gains, and choose the optimum set of improvements.

Harbour Branch Oceanographic Institute

Approximately 90% of all ocean life is bioluminescent, yet currently we know very little about when and why organisms use this ability to produce “cold light.” To facilitate the observation of deep-sea bioluminescence, the HBOI Clinic team has developed and built the “Eye in the Sea” observatory, an autonomous video acquisition system that includes a data logging and compression system and subject illumination source.

Irvine Ranch Water District asked the Clinic team to design a water quality multi-analyzer that can be used at various locations in their distribution system. The system must have an independent power source and also take water quality measurements, process those measurements, and communicate the results to the IRWD headquarters, a maximum distance of 10 miles.

Isis Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

As a leader in the drug development industry, Isis Pharmaceuticals is able to design safer, more effective drugs with its expertise in antisense technology. Isis requires a more efficient method of liquid transfer than the current implementation of handheld pipettes and automated pipetting arrays. For this project, a disposable sub-microliter pumping mechanism was designed, prototyped and tested to demonstrate reproducibility of drop volume. Isis will further develop the final design for integration with their new automation system for the biotechnology industry.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The goal of this project is to determine and verify a mathematical model for the behavior of a radioactive heat source on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. JPL is concerned that the radioactive source could melt through the ice to liquid water on Europa, possibly causing life from Earth to contaminate Europa. The team has implemented a model of the projected radioactive source behavior and conducted tests to verify the model’s validity in an environment similar to Europa.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The Image Processing Laboratory (IPL) provides editing, processing, and printing of high quality images for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena and currently uses a VAX/VMS telnet system for queueing. The Clinic team has designed and created a web-accessible, configurable printer queue using Sybase as the backend database, Perl scripts for the web interface, and an Apache web server for hosting the system.

Llumu Loma Linda University Medical Center

Sequential Alignment and Positioning Verification System for Functional Proton Radiosurgery

Traditional neurosurgery procedures require invasive techniques to gain access to the area of interest. Loma Linda University Medical Center (LLUMC) proposes an alternative non-invasive technique that uses narrow high-energy protons to destroy a target in the patient’s brain. The LLUMC Clinic team is to provide a sequential alignment and position verification system that will ensure and maintain the proper position and orientation of the proton beam with respect to the target area in the patient’s brain.

Metropolitan Wanter District of Southern California

Our team investigated increasing the water recovery of a membrane desalinating unit by combining the high salt rejection properties of reverse osmosis (RO) membranes with the high flux (production) properties of nanofiltration (NF) membranes. Using both membranes, the overall water recovery can go above 90% by tailoring the salt passage within the system. We developed models simulating hydraulic and physicochemical conditions within the RO/NF system, which are currently not available in commercial modeling software.

Minimed, Inc.

MiniMed has developed a disposable insulin pump for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes. Because this pump is a medical device, it must be sterilized with radiation. This radiation damages the electronics inside the pump. The team has been asked to redesign the pump apparatus so that the electronics can be easily inserted by the patient after the sterilization process.

Opto 22

Opto22 needs to replace two legacy integrated circuits due to cost, availibility, and performance constraints. One implements a subset of the ARCNET network communication protocol. The other performs a variety of monitoring and control functions for 32 optically isolated digital lines. The functionality of these chips has been written in synthesizable VHDL for FPGA implementation

Oregon Medical Laser Center

Laser tissue welding is a method of joining tissues together with no stitches, staples or sutures. It is still in the developmental phase, and current tissue welding techniques are highly dependent on the individual skill and technique of the operating surgeon. For any further advances to occur, the scientific community needs a more reproducible way to study tissue welding. Oregon Medical Laser Center has proposed that we design and build an automated laser guidance system that will attempt to eliminate human variation and error from the tissue welding process, thus yielding a safer surgical procedure.

Rain Bird

The Rain Bird team has designed, developed, and tested a mechanical timer and pilot valve for manual control of an Eagle rotor sprinkler for golf courses. The system is entirely mechanical, independent of an electric power source. The timer has been developed by modifying a household egg timer, and the valve was designed to allow or stop the flow of the water by redirecting the water through the use of o-rings.

Rockwell Collins

Next generation in-flight entertainment systems will provide commercial airline passengers with access to music, movies, and games on-demand for upwards of 400 independent users. Rockwell Collins requires a portable high-speed loading system to update the digital content at speeds up to 400 mbps, allowing complete program reloading in a half-hour aircraft gate time. To deter piracy, the loading system incorporates content encryption and decryption methods that meet MPAA and RIAA industry standards.

Sun Microsystems Laboratories

In modern digital systems, synchronous (clocked) circuitry is the standard method of design. There are many situations, however, where a digital system may benefit from an asynchronous (clock-free) component. Sun Microsystems Laboratories has tasked our Clinic team to design and implement an asynchronous FIFO buffer demonstrator board that will serve as an educational tool to teach and explain the benefits of asynchronous circuit designs for high-speed data communication.

Texas Instruments

The Clinic team developed a VHDL searcher that correlates GPS signals and reports the available satellites to a CPU. The team modified Texas Instruments’ (TI) searcher for CDMA base stations in order to reuse the already existing hardware as much as possible. The first step of the project was to focus on developing mathematical models for GPS signals and the searcher, and to set up the interface equipment necessary for the hardware implementation. Finally, the team modified TI’s VHDL code to support GPS satellite searching. After initial software simulation, the team integrated the VHDL code into FPGAs for hardware demonstration and for testing with a larger amount of test vectors.

The Clinic team has designed and implemented an internet-based advanced camera positioning and tracking system for Trex Enterprises’ high-resolution digital camera. While the camera’s video streams to the web in real time, the web user can control the camera’s pan and tilt position and its XY translational position. The tracking function allows the camera to recognize a laser point target and follow the target’s movement within the camera’s workspace.

The Clinic team has analyzed the Harvey Mudd College landscape, from environmental, social, and economic viewpoints. A quantitative cost-benefit analysis of the current campus and other, more regionally appropriate, landscapes was made. Subsequently alternative landscape designs and practices for HMC’s campus were proposed. As an example of possible alternative landscapes a resource-conserving garden was constructed on the HMC campus.

Quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is a process used to amplify a small unknown amount of DNA and determine how much of the given DNA species was initially present. This calculation depends on the selection of an appropriate threshold fluorescence value in the middle of the exponential region of the reaction’s amplification plot. Our task is to automate the selection of this threshold. We use linear regressions and Gaussian probability distributions.

Etec Systems produces laser lithography equipment used to create photomasks needed for the manufacture of semiconductor chips. Since the etching process is not exact, there is some probability that any single geometry on a chip will be defective, which renders the entire wafer useless. This project investigated methods to improve estimates of the expected percentage of photomasks that will meet quality control criteria. These methods include investigation of certain parametric distributions to better fit machine calibration data, and the use of bootstrap techniques to improve the estimates of key parameters.

Most web sites that help consumers decide between product offerings don’t explicitly incorporate preferences and tradeoffs between multiple, often conflicting, goals. In an effort to make e-commerce more personalized, our team, together with Fair, Isaac and Co., Inc., has developed two sites that help users make car-buying decisions. The first is a direct implementation of Utility Theory, while the second is based on the method of Even Swaps.

Space Systems/Loral

Space Systems/Loral is researching the use of ion propulsion to more efficiently raise newly launched satellites to their final orbits. However, as ion propulsion yields thrusts on the order of 1/1000 that of traditional chemical engines, the time of orbit transfer is significantly extended. Our goal is to develop a software package that will optimize (for time and fuel consumption) the use of low-thrust engines for satellite orbit raising.

Physics Clinic

Etec Systems, Inc., An Applied Materials Company

Etec Systems, Inc. is a worldwide leader in the designing, manufacturing, and marketing of mask-making solutions for the semiconductor industry. Our Clinic team is providing Etec with a feasibility study on a potential technology for tightening the focus point of a laser on the photoresist layer of a mask beyond the normal diffraction limit, enabling the writing of smaller mask features. We report both analytical and experimental results.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory Clinic team investigated various behavioral aspects of a novel magnetotactic bacterium, LA-ARB-1. Aerotaxis, phototaxis, motility, and viability studies were the focus of the teams investigations. Results from their work contribute to a better understanding of how LA-ARB-1 uses its internal structure to take advantage of its unique environment.